Founders
by silent-voices
Summary: A collection of short ficlets relating to the founders. Written for the 100quills challenge.
1. The Only Person

**Notes:** these ficlets have been written for the 100quills challenge over on LJ. I claimed a 50 prompt table for the Hogwarts Founders. These ficlets are not chronological – if they're supposed to be read together, I will mention it.

Prompt 1. Doubt

**The Only Person**

"I don't think I can do this, Row."

Rowena smiles. "You can. And don't call me Row."

"Sorry. I just don't know if there's anything I can contribute that one of you three can't."

Rowena lets the book in her hands fall shut and looks at Helga, small and incredibly blonde in the flickering flame of the candles. "Are you serious?"

Helga sighs. "Yes, I am. I want this school, but I don't know what I'll do there. Will I teach? Will I pass on anything of importance to the pupils? Will I be able to teach them anything they don't know yet? Or will I just be some woman who's always around that you can talk to?"

"We need you, Helga. All three of us do."

"Maybe the students won't." She sniffs and Rowena is struck by how vulnerable she looks, strong Helga, cheerful Helga.

"Look at me." Rowena says, almost sternly, and waits for Helga to comply. "We need your patience, your big heart and your happiness, Helga. You know how elitist Salazar can be, and how Godric still hasn't learned to think before he does something, and how… down I sometimes get. You'll be… the only person worthy of professorhood." And she smiles at her friend, realising how true it is.

Helga brushes her hair out of her eyes and lets out a shaky breath.


	2. Magic Is Coming

Prompt 2. Magical

**Magic Is Coming**

Helga's standing on the steps leading up to the castle, her arms wrapped around herself. Cold and howling in the minutes before sunset, the Scottish wind pulls mercilessly at her sky-blue robes and the meticulously pulled-up hair, that's now starting to break free from its stern bun. She looks as if she might be taking flight any minute.

The castle behind her is radiating heat. She knows the house elves are finishing the last touches to the meal and she knows Godric is pacing endlessly in his room, running over his welcome speech in his mind. She doesn't know where Salazar is, but she knows it's somewhere he can scream to soothe his nerves. Rowena is on the train, a one-time favour just to make sure this first time comes to a good ending.

There are shocks running up and down Helga's nerves. It's unlike anything she's ever felt before - she thought she was nervous when her grandfather questioned her on her theory of potions, or when her mother requested for her to play the lute in front of all of her aunts and uncles, or when Salazar told her that lad at the bar was looking at her. This is different; instead of feeling her stomach fill up with unpleasant tickles, her stomach has seemed to have swelled, filling up her entire body. She's made out of black hole and an outer skin. It makes her weak.

Helga wonders how many pupils will actually show up.

The station is still empty, but she can feel the train approaching: the air is speeding up around her. Storm is coming. Magic is coming.


	3. Going Home

Prompt 3: Tomorrow.

**Going Home**

Summer, buzzing with heat and song and light, sticks to Salazar's hair and fingers as he strides across the school grounds. His heavy robes are like lead on his shoulders and he can't wait to get to the privacy of his quarters to slip out of them, dust them off carefully and then hang them in his closet to be undisturbed for two months. June is drawing to a close, almost unbearably hot like a warm pocket of heavy air that swirls around the castle. Sweat runs down his brow and he wipes it away quickly, still walking swiftly towards the entrance gate, which is thrown wide open in the hopes of keeping the students from passing out over their examinations. It's the last one. In a couple of days another school year will be over. He remembers the first year, now three years ago, which was the one with the coldest winter he's ever experienced (partly because the house elves hadn't been properly organised yet and most of the castle wasn't being warmed by the hearths). He recalls how close the pupils – only about twenty-five in those uncertain starting days, the twenty-five now hopefully fruitfully ending their third year – huddled together to keep warm and how Locusta, the potions mistress, fell ill around January due to the persistent cold and draught in the dungeons. She never fully recovered and now teaches classes sporadically, pale and pasty and always wrapped in heavy black dresses (even now in June). He took over her class when she was unable to teach, which effectively meant he was the teacher most of the time – a difficult thing to combine with his other subjects, Magical Mythology and Study of the Dark Arts. He needs to find a new potions master for the year that's coming.

All that are just worries for tomorrow, though. All he wants now is a glass of iced pumpkin juice and his light, white summer robe which he'd gotten on his trip to Île de France two years ago.

Upon entering the entrance hall, he runs into Julian Shevick, who seems to be having a conversation with one of the paintings mounted on the wall.

"Shevick," Salazar barks, "what are you doing outside of your examination classroom?"

The boy, startled, jumps around and immediately assumes a submissive attitude. "Please forgive me, sir, but madam Ravenclaw sent me away."

"And why exactly did she do that?" Salazar makes sure to tower menacingly over the second year.

"Madam said I needed to go pack my bags."

Salazar doesn't show the confusion bubbling up inside him. "Why? You're not leaving until four days from now."

The boy shrinks away from his professor's icy tone, but answers anyhow. "She's taking me to her home, sir."

A silence in which Salazar doesn't know what to say and, uncomfortably, feels sweat drops inching their way down his shoulder blades.

"I don't have a place to go back to, sir," Shevick continues bravely, "Madam said she would take me with her when she goes home tomorrow."

Salazar sniffs. "Well then! Go pack your bags, now," he instructs the student, before taking off in the direction of his chambers. He needs to get a hold of Rowena before she leaves tomorrow. What exactly is she trying to do?


	4. Walk Away

Prompt 4: Blank

Follows Going Home.

**Walk Away**

He finds Rowena in the tall grass at the edge of the forest. She's pulled off her hat and long strings of her hair have fallen out from its bun. He advances on her.

"Pull your hair back," he hisses, "the students might see."

She doesn't even seem to see him for a moment, then focuses and smiles a small smile. "You worry too much, Salazar. The students are doing their examinations."

"They would be, yes, if you hadn't sent them to go pack their bags!"

She frowns and then begins to pull her wayward locks back. "I have only told one student to go pack their bags, Salazar, and I'm sure he's not in the ability to see us from his dormitory."

"Rowena, don't you think you should have told us about this decision to… whatever it is you're planning with Shevick?" He's angry with her, can't stand that she's almost taller than he is and that he can see her say it : _I'm taking you with me_ – with her face relaxed, no smile but a warmth in her eyes and with all of her faraway charm that still shines through the blackness of her heavy professor's robe. He can't stand that little Shevick knows that he didn't know.

She draws herself up to her full height; they're almost eye to eye now. "I did tell you, Salazar. He's a boy without parents and with extraordinary talents. I told you that I was taking him with me yesterday. I don't think the fact that you'd rather be writing your book every single second of every single day should be held against me. You don't listen."

_I do_, he thinks, but he can't say it. He just stares at her blankly, at her and her way of walking away.


	5. Learn

Prompt 5. Destiny.

**Learn **

They were born in an age without learning. The times were dark with threats of disease and creeping evil. The Muggle witch hunts were getting more ferocious and high-scale; not a lot of true wizards and witches were murdered, but many innocents were. There was talk of the devil walking, of England drifting away from the rest of the world, of ways of murder that even magic could not prevent. People shielded their faces when meeting each other on the streets.

Godric grew up in a house of wood. The continuous fire hazard was in a way his education – he had been burned before and in the spur and pain of the moment, he had made his wand spout water. It would save them countless of times. Godric had a wand because his mother was an heiress – their family's power was waning, but their name still held some force in the wizarding world. The old house of Ollivander was sensitive to names. Godric had a wand but only small ways in which to use it.

At that time there was no education for the children of wizards and witches, unless their parents were generous and wealthy enough to hire a private master. Godric's mother, rich only in name, could do little more than teach Godric what she had learned during her own sparse education. After a lesson, her face was blotchy and she always heaved a sigh. "Our tradition are disappearing, Godric," she would say, "who will uphold them if no one passes them on?"

He had felt terrible about that.

His distant father, who only visited now and then, told him about grand libraries up north, containing all the riches of the mind since the dawn of time. People were using the books to feed their hearths, he said. Even witches and wizards had forgotten how to make fire.

Godric taught his cousin, who lived with them, what his mother taught him. He let the small boy use his wand now and then. He explained how to put out a fire. He explained how to channel the bursts of energy that well up inside you when you're angry or sad.

His mother, watching from the door opening, sighed as always and said to him: "You and people like you are the hope of our world, Godric."

He dreamt of the libraries going up in flame and said to himself he would make it stop.


	6. Canvas

Prompt 6: Picture

**Canvas **

Salazar has seen more students pass beneath him than any other painting in the castle. The Headmasters, who invariably have beards and worry lines and warmer smiles than he himself ever had, change his position when they take office – they leave Rowena to guard Ravenclaw tower, Helga is never taken away from her precious greenhouses and Godric balances on the edge of the Owlery (he never quite understood why), but Salazar's place has been changed so often that he sometimes feels as if he's been hanging upside down for centuries. Maybe he has.

The cruelty of it all is that he still has enough conscience to recall that he once knew things, but not enough to remember them. It's frustrating, like how the green-striped ties of some pupils inspire a strange kind of excitement in him and he doesn't know why. He tries to press through the canvas but he _is_ the canvas and he's only tearing himself apart. There's a small moment before he sinks back into his monotony. When he looks up again, he wants to try again. Hundreds of years have finally taught him that it's not possible – he knows he used to learn things much faster before, but that's all he knows.

The last headmaster has put him up on some distant ridge down in the dungeons. Lots of children with green-striped ties pass him and they often nod at him. Salazar doesn't acknowledge them, feels the strange pang of something in his linen body. He's been smeared and streaked and hit with all sorts of potions, but sometimes he still feels his limbs. All he can think of is that he doesn't know the way to Godric's painting from down here.

He leans against the frame, closes his eyes and waits for the next headmaster.


	7. Green

Prompt 7: Gentle

Goes with Going Home and Walk Away

**Green **

He looks decidedly out of place amidst the abundance of green and spring that is crowded together in the steaming greenhouses. Salazar was made to sit amongst dusty tomes, the kind that still needs translating from ancient Greek into English, the kind that takes up an entire desk. Salazar looks his best poring over old texts dealing with monsters and fables and the history of nobility. It's the way he holds his shoulders, Helga sometimes thinks, pretending to be broad and square but librarian-like in reality. He's weighed down by the books as much as he's lifted up by them.

Amongst the red splashes of blooming flowers and the dark green of creeping plants, Salazar looks too small. The plants are leering at him, waiting to eat him. It makes Helga smile, although she wonders why he's here – they haven't been talking much lately, with the plants needing so much attention and his library, now desecrated by the students. (He always says libraries are for books, not people – which makes her smile when he's turned away from her.)

"Good morning," she greets him, stepping out from between the plants and making her presence known.

He starts, then smiles at her. She notices how his eyes are darkly lined.

"Good morning," he replies, making a small bow.

"Are you feeling well?" she asks after a moment of silence. He seems extremely tired and his shoulders don't have the seeming-square look. He looks like a small animal.

"No," he says.

"What happened?" She looks at him, while pulling off her dirty gloves.

"Rowena has… Rowena has done something I don't understand."

She smiles at him. "That's what Rowena does and it's what she'll always do, Salazar."

"This time it's not like that."

"What then?"

"She's taking Shevick into her home."

She understands then, understands why he looks so childlike standing under the huge wild plants. "You're afraid of him, are you not?"

He shakes his head, but at the same time tells her yes.

Gently, she places her hand on his face. He closes his eyes, face tinted green.


	8. Wrong

Prompt 8. Wrong

**Wrong **

Godric bursts into the Magical Mythology class on Wednesday, interrupting Salazar's story about Sisyphus' continual memory training and the charms that came from it and looking livid. Salazar is still in the middle of a word (_boulder_) when Godric slams a fist into his desk. The students stare at their professors, mouth open.

"I will not have you treat our pupils this way," Godric hisses between clenched teeth. Salazar can tell the only reason he's not screaming are the students blinking at them.

"Oh, in that case," Salazar replies sarcastically, "it's forgiven that you interrupt my class and my teaching in this rude and barbaric manner."

"Class dismissed!" Godric throws the words over his shoulder at the students. The children are confused, look to Salazar for confirmation.

"Listen to professor Gryffindor and go to your dormitory," Salazar says coldly, not looking at the class but at Godric, whose cheeks are blotchy. There's a vein throbbing in his neck.

The students hastily file out of the classroom, sensing the tension between the two men at the desk.

"Well?" Salazar says. "What are you trying to do, undermining my authority and my lessons in front of my students and making an utter fool of yourself in the process?"

"As if you care about the students!" Godric bites.

"I have no idea what you're raving about, Godric," Salazar says calmly, "and I would appreciate it if you talked to me on a normal tone, in a way worthy of grown wizards. Although maybe I should expect no less from a man, a teacher himself, who doesn't see the wrong in breaking apart a colleague's lesson."

Godric takes a step back and looks Salazar in the face. He's irate. "You were my friend once," he says, in the quiet way that Salazar knows means that he's really, truly angry. Angry beyond shouting, angry in the head-splitting, body-wrecking way. Godric still allows his feelings to run away with him. It's something Salazar has disapproved of ever since they met.

"I was your friend before and I would like to continue our long-standing relationship," Salazar replies, "but I can hardly respect you when you behave like this."

"And I can hardly respect _you_ when you tell our pupils their parents are worth nothing more than piles of dragon excrement, that they themselves should be expelled for their heritage! You have refused students for your advanced classes based on nothing but the family they come from!"

Salazar smiles. "I have not used the word 'excrement'."

Godric seems to be on the verge of something now – hitting him, crying, breaking into a wild scream maybe, Salazar isn't sure. He's sure something is breaking inside Godric, and even though the knowledge hurts him, he can't allow Godric's sentimentality to come between him and his principles.

"You're wrong," Godric says silently. There are tears brimming in his eyes, Salazar notes with a certain annoyance and yet, detachment too.

"'Wrong' is only a relative statement, depending on subjective standards, my dear friend," he says gently, even though 'my dear friend' is a term of the past.

Godric is swaying on his legs, looks ready to faint. "I wish I didn't know how good you can be, Salazar," he whispers, "maybe then I wouldn't mind so much to see how bad you've become." He leaves.

Salazar sighs and rearranges his quills.


	9. Once

Prompt: 9. Circle

**Once **

It's not so much that the connections that bind them disappear, it's that they grow slack and thin over the course of the years. Is it the same thing? When left alone for too long, it is.

There was love once, Godric remembers on the nights when the fabric of the present seems to be woven out of memory. They were young once, but already old beyond their years in some ways. Salazar still wore blue and sometimes red in those days, smiling at something else than the dusty wrinkled parchment written by the trembling hands of stern, dead men. He still smiled at _them_ in those days and read them from his favourite books, voice slow and warm and carrying away into the evening. The girls were in another room, listening in silently. They loved Salazar and his books, Godric knows – and he knows he loved Salazar and his books _too_, how Salazar could stand up from his chair because his excitement was too large to be contained in his sitting form, and how his hands flew around like birds to illustrate how important this was, how life-altering, how mind-freeing.

Watching Salazar explain how your mind could be freed made your heart soar.

There was need once, Godric remembers as the night gathers around him and the castle starts to speak. Rowena came running to him in tears on the nights when sleep eluded her and the darkness came too close. Out of the four of them, she was the worst sleeper; she couldn't help it, couldn't ward off the questions that attacked her when the day's business fell away. She wanted control and she wanted questions with answers. Godric put his hand on her head and told her there were many answers without questions and many questions without answers – when she looked up at him in tears, he told her he had always thought of her as an answer without a question, a prayer that hadn't been prayed and yet been heard (a reason to be there, someone to live for). He hadn't asked for her but there she was.

Even if she still couldn't sleep, she thanked him deeply, genuinely and as he looked at her, he felt his heart swell.

There was want once, Godric remembers when he's teaching classes of children who look up at him with bland faces and don't seem to care. There was the mutual will to be together. Helga; silent, easy, lovely Helga – the one he trusted the most, the one whose smile brightened a day. Helga was always doing something. Making soup, tending the greenhouses, telling the pupils about the time without education and she did all of it with relish and that smile. She make the painful muscles of Godric's chest relax as he simply fell into her sunny presence. The presence of a friend who knows you well enough not to ask what's wrong, but make it better right away just by smiling at you. In the mornings, she often said over breakfast: "Help me with the greenhouses?" or "Take a walk this afternoon?" and he would nod and feel the consistent, whining pain in his chest subside. He wanted to spend time with her.

Being with Helga was liberating and made his tense body relax.

It's strange how those things can pass, and how gradually it happens. A change so constant yet so slow that he hadn't even acknowledged it until he suddenly realised he hadn't seen Helga's greenhouses in five weeks, that he could only nod at Salazar over breakfast (having nothing but poisonous words waiting on his tongue), that he didn't know how Rowena had slept the past week.

They're colleagues now and it still binds them. But they're lonely planets now, torn from their close and cosy sun system, sailing through the air alone. The gravity between them has grown thin.

Godric sleeps alone.


	10. Asymmetry

Prompt 10: Breakfast

**Asymmetry**

The first words Helga says to Godric in seven long, lonely days are: "We need to find a new professor."

He looks at her, sees how pointedly she doesn't look back, hiding her face behind a curtain of blonde. He knows she's just trying not to break down in front of the students, but it still pains him, _there_, in that space in his chest that stops hurting whenever she smiles at him. Next to her, Rowena is inspecting her goblet as if it's something of great interest. She's been crying, he can tell, but she's mastered her role, her cold smooth role again.

"You're right," he answers after a few moments and he feels it and he's sure they feel it _too_: how definite that makes it, how real.

"Yes, we can't keep it up like this," Rowena murmurs her assent, "our work load is already heavy."

They sit in silence.

The seat next to Helga is screamingly empty, which makes it seem as if she's miles away. The house elves don't know yet it's the staff minus one now. Godric reminds himself to tell them, _today_, because the last seven days he's wanted nothing more than to swipe Salazar's plate off the table and hear how it clangs in the silence of the hall. He's wanted nothing more than steal his goblet and stuff it in his pocket, look at it when the candles go out. He's wanted nothing more than to write _I'm sorry, come back please please please_ but another part of him wants him to be stronger than this useless melancholy for times past. He puts his knife into the sausages Salazar loved to eat and sees how alone he is; a table for four filled by three.

Breakfast is strangely asymmetric from then on.


	11. Winter

Prompt 11: Ice

**Winter**

In their lifetime, the winters slowed down and became less breathtaking (in more than one way). Maybe Helga is old now (almost fifty!), and the only one of them still slightly standing, but she can bear the cold in a way that she couldn't when they were young, even if now she is weak and her bones smart with every movement. The winters have gone soft.

Not so in the early years of Hogwarts. The bottom of the lake was an area still alien to them and the students told horrific stories of what they had seen surface on still and icy nights, so it was with anxiety that Helga saw the lake surface close in that winter when even the hearths were cold despite the fires roaring in them – a tight, slightly greenish ice that lay from one side of the lake to the other that had plants and small animals trapped in it. During the night she heard the ice softly singing as she lay shivering in her clammy bed. The castle was a lump of cold.

Of course, their students were children and that was what she worried about, not the presence of the ice itself (because unlike Godric she didn't believe that nature possessed dark magic - God had made it to help humankind, not hurt it and her trust in this was great). Those children, without parents to tighten their shawls and sternly forbid them to enter the ice, slipped from under the wary eyes of the staff and slid and tumbled over the ice, the ice that left green stains on their winter robes.

They were all warm when they came in and Helga privately had to wonder.

She remembers how that boy Shevick was sliding across the ice and how Rowena touched Helga's arm when she saw, with a sadness, a worry on her face. Helga thought she looked like a mother and that thought scared her. Shevick wasn't her son except the look on her face said he was.

Salazar came striding into the teacher's room, wearing a fur hat that drooped far too low over his eyes (making him look somewhat like a demented bear).

"Well," he said, "all those children are out there and we are all in here. We're being irresponsible."

Helga smiled at him. She knew he was only trying to mask his desire to play with seriousness.

"I'll go and watch them with you."

The smile from under his bear hat was warm enough to make her sweat. He took her hand and pulled her out, almost running, and the first thing he did when they came outside was push her onto the ice.

She's old now (almost fifty!) but remembers the cold that was so cold it was warm, and the green splashes on Salazar's smiling face as they ran like children, and her heart that was singing along with the ice. He dumped a handful of snow in her collar and didn't seem to mind when the students realised they were there. At the end of the day, she was wearing his bear hat and his cheeks were red with cold and smiles. Godric was waiting with hot tea in the teacher's room, suppressing a grin (she could tell).

Now she knows: that sort of winter is over. The depths are known and the ice is clean but weak. The professors warn the children to leave the lake alone (she knows because they still write letters, as if it's their duty to). It's too warm in her room – she can only sleep and dream of bear hats and a handful of snow in her neck.


End file.
